1st Impressions

Block Drop was a great surprise to me.  It is a great little game and is currently on sale for $0.99 in the app store.  Controls are very simple.  The arrows on the right control direction.  Holding down the “button” on the left allows you to jump your “gem” two places.  It is kinda like a cross between Time Box or Nintaii and one of those peg-jumping games.  Instead of rolling a block around to get it to land on a particular place, the object is to jump from square to square, making them disappear as you leave them, until just the one with a checkerboard is left. Makes for a very unique take on an old classic.  Since you can get multiple blocks stacked up in the same location, some squares will have to be jumped on more than once to make them all disappear.  In case these “stacks” obstruct your view, a small “map” appears in the top right corner of the screen.  If you get stuck, there is a great option to show the solution.

This map and the solution gets critical as you go to higher and higher levels.  Every level that you play is completely randomly generated.   Level 1 starts with 5 blocks.  Each subsequent level contains one more block than the previous one. Level 21 has 25 blocks and so on up to level 999 which contains 1004 blocks.  When you choose a level, you are basically choosing a difficulty level.  Ultimately, this means that you have an unlimited number of “levels” with 999 levels of difficulty.

Not only are the graphics stunning on the 999 levels, but the computer generated sound score is very relaxing and, unexpectedly to me, really adds a lot to the game.  One thing I could possibly would suggest for this title is an “undo” feature and/or a button to reset the level.  Block Drop is $0.99 in the app store for just a short period of time though, so get this while it is on sale.  It is the perfect addition to any puzzle-lover’s collection and makes my Must-Have list.  If you like puzzles, you won’t regret it.  This title is quickly becoming a favorite and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

CS One, or Circuit Strike One, is a game release by Chillingo.  I’ve reviewed a lot of their games in the past, but even with Chillingo, not all games are equal.  This one didn’t quite do it for me.  As is expected with their games, the graphics are wonderful. The game not only offers the ability to listen to your iPod library (an option I really like), but also different controller options, ship styles, and online stats and leader boards.

My suggestions for the game are few.  I found the text on the buttons to be hard to read.  The font could be a bit easier to understand.  Second, I’d love for there to be some in-game instructions.   While I could fly around and eventually hit “asteroids” and blow myself up, I don’t really think that was the object of the game.  I did it real well though! LOL

CS One is only $0.99 in the iTunes store.  If you are into arcade style games it’s definitely worth the buck to check it out.  It has great reviews by those into arcade style gaming.  I’m just not that guy though.

4 Bugs is a nice puzzle game.  At $1.99, it offers 500 different photos that you have to compare and locate the four differences between them.  They are often very subtle.  Between the two photos is a lit fuse that is burning down that indicates your time left in the level.  I generally don’t like playing against a timer.  It causes me stress.  While the game offers both single player and dual player modes, I really wish that there was a mode that was not timed so that you could relax a bit with the game.  I also wish that, upon the conclusion of the round, that there was a better and slower indication of the places/differences that you miss.  Right now, it places a mark over a difference, which covers the actual difference, and then the screen goes back to the menu so quickly that you can’t really see what you missed.

Overall, I would give this game a passing score.  It is well implemented.  It’s just not my particular cup of tea.

As a news junkie, I’ve been anticipating the BNO News app ever since it was announced.  For those of you familiar with news sources on Twitter, @BreakingNews is consistently one of the best sources for breaking news.  It repeatedly beats any competition with the first to post an alert.  They are able to do this because they don’t just repeat news, they are a new Breaking News wire service.  They even offer email alerts if you are not into Twitter.  Since early March, they have gone from roughly 30,000 fans/followers getting their alerts to a million or more and are now adding to that by as many as 10,000 per day.  You don’t get that kind of following without providing premium news content.

The BNO News app is much more than just another interface to their Twitter account.  While I followed the Twitter tweets, I did not subscribe to the SMS alerts for them.  Did not want SMS alerts for everything.  Advertisements for the BNO service was not something that I wanted to wake me.  But this app has some really nice push features.  You can turn off the push alerts between certain hours, and also turn off alerts for low priority news.  Push notifications that the Russians have two nuclear attack subs patrolling the eastern seaboard of the US get though with a popup window and alert sound (just like a SMS).  The fact that the Russian president called Obama to wish him happy birthday (with subs? LOL) did not alert.  But it and all the other news is available in the application.  As you can see in the first image that I posted, the critical alerts are marked with a bar on the left side.

When you tap on a news item, you are brought to a second screen.  This screen reflects the link to the story (which will take you to the third screen I posted) if one exists, as well as the option to turn on or off the alerts for low priority news.  If I could offer one suggestion at this point, I would love for the tap of an item in the news list to take you directly to the full story, with perhaps a finger swipe that will take you to this intermediate screen that doesn’t really offer a lot of new information.

The app is a very reasonable $1.99 in the app store.  This covers the first month of push notifications.  After that, a subscription fee of $0.99/month will be introduced that will cover the bandwidth costs of the notifications and offer additional options.  As the app description puts it, “Non-subscribers will still continue to receive some notifications but will not have the more advanced filtering enabled. The monthly subscription fee will be the current minimum product price in the App Store ($0.99 in America).”

Besides wishing that I could bypass this second screen, I would love to have the ability to interface to Twitter and re-tweet a story, the ability to forward a headline via SMS and/or email, and once on a page for the full details of a story, the ability to email the link or bookmark it.  Perhaps this could be done with an option to open the news links in Safari and a link to Twitter where things could be re-tweeted from there.  Enabling cut & paste within the app might work as well.

The bottom line is that this app does not disappoint.  It makes my Must-Have list.  With additional releases already being planned, I am looking forward to all this will offer as the app matures.

I’ve tested or reviewed close to 400 apps on my iPhone.  Some, even if they make it to my Must Have list, don’t permanently remain on my iPhone.  I just stick them on as needed/desired.  But there are a few apps that I find myself using on a daily basis.  Before I tackle my backlog of apps/games waiting for review, I thought I’d mention my most frequently used apps.  Other than Safari, the built-in dialer, contacts, and the iPod app, here are some third-party ones that I just can’t seem to get away from.

CropForFree lets you rotate and crop your images – for free.  If you are emailing them or posting them anywhere, this is a great utility.

Gratuitous is the tip calculator that I stuck with.  I tried a lot of them.  Wrote reviews on some of them.  But Gratuitous has the perfect balance of simple interface and functionality.

MyWeather is one of the more expensive weather apps, but it is my favorite.  I think WeatherBug Elite has nice features as well, but prefer the MyWeather interface

Pandora.  Need I say more?  Huge fan!

Quick News is my favorite one-stop news portal.  Now if they would only let me add a custom RSS feed…

Splash ID is my brain.  Been using it for years.  Their iPhone version is one of their best products to date.

TweetDeck is the only way to separate Twitter tweets into any kind of digestible format.  And it too is free.

VoiceCentral is my Google Voice app of choice until the FCC & FTC spanks Apple and teaches them a few things about monopolies.  I mean come on guys!  Would you purchase a computer from some place that not only sold you the hardware and OS, but told you what applications you could run on it?  Would you buy a car from someone that limited you to certain gas stations and roads?  A phone from some place that would only dial approved numbers?  But I digress…  When Google’s native app becomes available, I will probably switch to that.  When they are eventually allowed to integrate it in as the default dialer and voice mail app, it will be a no-brainer.

What’s On TV? has quickly replaced TV Forecast as my favorite TV app.  I don’t suffer the same crashes that I did with TV Forecast.  And it’s FREE!  Not only does it have a quick view of all new upcoming episodes of your favorite shows, but also has an included guide of all the shows on at a particular time.  The only thing that keeps this from being the perfect app (little review here) is that I’d love to be able to search for all season or series premiers and an option for SMS or email reminders.

If you notice, there are no games on that list.  While I enjoy games, and enjoy testing and reviewing new ones, I usually don’t play any single game more than a couple of hours (or less) before moving on.  There are very few that I find myself returning to.  Right now, the only ones that I find myself coming back to is SimCity,  Defender Chronicles, Montezuma, and Toki Tori.  I think if you added these four games to all the apps/utilities listed above (and my audio books), I could probably get by with nothing else on my iPhone for a week or more at a time.

Warped Space is a perfect little $0.99 game.  Simple to learn, and frustrating to master.  The goal is simple.  You need to launch from one blue planet to another without hitting any other planets on the way, but using their gravitational force to your advantage.  You are scored based on the level of force you use on launch, the level of difficulty, and the length of your trip.  By choosing a high level of difficulty, the lowest possible initial force, and the longest flight – possibly involving ever-larger orbits around planets on the way – you can hopefully set a high score on the leader board.  With 13 levels (including the 2 simple tutorial ones) and 4 levels of difficulty, the game promises a lot of entertainment.

Game controls are simple.  Using the little grey circle at the bottom of the screen or your initial planet as a guide, position your finger (or the white dot) in the direction you want to go and indicate the initial thrust by positioning it closer or further from the center of the grey area or the planet you are launching from.   As you move your “aim” around, a line shows up on the screen to indicate the projected path.  Since I have big fingers, I find using the entire screen as it relates to the initial planet to give me much more control over things.  Once the trajectory is what you want, just tap the fire icon.  It’s really that simple.  A full tutorial and video showing game play are available on the developer’s web site if you need more.

The game comes with no background music.  You can supply your own with your iTunes library.  I prefer that.  I hate it when a nice game has a repetitive soundtrack that I cannot replace with my preferred style of music or audio book.  The developers wanted a real critical review and honesty.  If the game sucked, they wanted to know.  So I’ll come right out with it.  No holding back.  If you like a fun little physics game at a great price, you owe it to yourself to check this little game out.  Make sure you reset your device after installing it though.  I received a graphically mixed up “first time playing” message the first time I launched the game.  It’s never happened since though, and since I didn’t do my normal reset after adding new stuff, I can’t say that it wasn’t my own fault.

My suggestion for the games would include the option to always submit your top score for each level, showing the top score from the leaderboard for each level/difficulty combination at the top of the screen (instead of the author), and the addition of a “next level” option beside the button to replay the current one.

While Politico Tracker Twitter Edition, which I just reviewed, is a great tool for the new junkie, consider the full-blown Politico Tracker app as the toolbox.  You are not limited to the PR kind of stuff that a politician may post on Twitter.  To say that this app is comprehensive is an understatement.  To do it justice, you would really have to delve into the documentation on the developer’s site.  I’ll try to sumarize it though.

While this app does require the internet to work, it does a lot more than just a web search on a politician.  Using the unique Llesiant technology, it accesses “over 25,000 publications from around the globe – including more than 11,000 State and Federal Government News Sources”.  This includes newspapers and such, but also press releases, industry journals, lobbiest groups (like AARP), and so forth.  These can be categorized by source, topic, and other means.  For example, if I am interested in the recent ruling where a federal judge in Florida ruled that Georgia couldn’t use water from a lake that resided there but must let the water flow out of Georgia and into Florida (nuts, I know!), I can choose to look at the stories related to my senior senator and the Army Corps of Engineers.  The app finds nine recent articles on that.  If your chosen politician is mentioned in an article, the headline shows up.  Clicking on the headline will bring up the excerpt of the article in which they are mentioned and highlight their name.  The source of the article is hyperlinked and will take you to the full article at the original location.

Both state and federal politicians are available in the database for your selection.  While the politician database is not categorized by state like the Twitter Edition is, that is coming in the next update along with an update to about 8,000 politicians in the database.   Other improvements will include the ability to email the articles that you find of interest.  You can currently save them on your system for reading later or open it in Safari and email it from there.

The new state categories for looking up your politician is going to be a huge improvement in this app.  I’ve suggested taking it a step further though and allow those that need to the ability to find out who their representatives are though in case they don’t know.  As I suggested in the Twitter app, I’d also love to see the ability to add candidates to the database and not have it limited to current politicians.  Right now, the starting point for a search is a specific politician.  Ultimately, I’d love to be able to search the news database using the existing categories or sources or industries as the starting point and review the headlines no matter what politician is mentioned.  As a $10 app, the amount of information available is incredible.  How to get to it though is still limited.  In my water wars example above, I’d love to see all the recent stories about the Corp of Engineers without having to go look up who the politicians from Florida and Alabama are that may have commented on it.  For that matter, being able to put in a custom search term, like “Lake Lanier”, would add incredible power to this already useful application.  It would make it more topic driven and politician driven.

UPDATE: The update for OS 3.0 has now been approved by Apple.  It includes 30% more politicians, sorting them by state or name, email of links to articles, and other improvements.

The folks at pTracker LLC have come up with two apps that are perfect for the news junkie that follows US politics.  The first, and simpler of the two, is the $0.99 Politico Tracker Twitter Edition.  As the name indicates, this app is a collection of twitter feeds from different political figures.  Obviously not every politician understands the internet, much less Twitter, but for those that do, this is the app for following that.

When you first launch the app, you are provided with a  list of  national figures, such as the current President and Vice President, followed by categories by state.  Here in Georgia, ten different politicians are listed, including former Congressman and House Speaker Newt Gingrich.  Upon selecting any of the politicians, you can then add them to a favorites list that is brought up when you tap the little icon in the top left corner of the app.

There are two things I would love to have in the app though.  First, I would love the ability to add the URL or Twitter name of someone to follow that isn’t on the built-in list.  This would allow for the “following” of candidates for politician office and could optionally send that info to the developers for possible addition in the next update.  Second, I would love for there to be a “timeline” kind of view for all my favorites so that I would not have to open each one individually to see if there was an update.  Overall though, the app is very well put together and a great tool for any news junkie interested in US politics.

Before I can get into why you need Voice Central, you need to understand Google Voice.  As a current beta user (because I used its predecessor), let me try to explain it.  Remember the freedom you felt when you signed up for something like Gmail and could suddenly have email that you could check from any computer and it could forward on to a private email address based on search criteria and such?  Email became both portable and powerful.  Well a company came along, Grand Central (later purchased by Google and renamed Google Voice), that did the same kind of things with your phone.  Instead of just having a number assigned to your specific device and location, the number was assigned to the person.  You can give out your Google Voice number and your home, work, and/or cell numbers remain private.  As those other numbers change, you don’t have to contact everyone you know with the change.  Depending on the categories in which you place a contact, they only reach you at certain numbers that you define or at *any* of your numbers.  People don’t have to guess what number to call you at.  They call *you* and Google Voice calls your specified numbers.  You can even set it up so that the number calls all your numbers and you just pick up the call at which ever one you are at.  If you pick it up at work and need to leave for home, you can transfer the call to your cell, talk on the way to the house, then transfer the call to your home phone.  As if this were not enough, you can screen your calls and, depending on who it is, answer it, dump them to voice mail, record the call, or even block calls from certain numbers.  And to quote the late Billy Mays, “But wait!  There’s more!”  Voice mails left at your number are transcribed and sent to you via SMS or email, you can send and receive SMS messages at your number, and these SMS and voice messages can be searched just like past emails can be with Gmail.  You can use Google Voice to initiate calls as well.  Domestic calls are free, and international ones are cheap.  Just tell it who you wish to call.  It calls your designated numbers, you pick up, and it then connects you to the number you are calling.  They get your Google Voice number on their caller ID and not your private personal number.  You can even use the service to conference in up to four calls together or set up a call widget on a web site so that a visitor can put in their phone number and it will connect them with you without them knowing your number.  Finally, when you sign up (as soon as it gets out of beta) you can select a nice number that is easy to remember.  For example, my number is my area code, a 223 prefix, and my four-digit birthday.  And it’s mine for life.  For a video overview of what all it does, check out this YouTube link.  If you are not a Google Voice user and want an invite, they are going out now.  Sign up for one here.

Enough about Google Voice though.  If you, as a prior Grand Central user or future Google Voice user, have access to the service, Voice Central is “the iPhone app for that”.  It is an iPhone interface to your Google Voice account.  With it, you can initiate calls to people in your iPhone address book, listen to your voice mail,  view a history of your calls and text messages, and does all this without some of the issues associated with a similar product.  The nice thing about this product is that it lets you send and receive text messages to someone without giving them your cell phone number.  They get your Google Voice number.  This, in effect, allows you to send text messages from a land line (like your home or office) because if they call you back, it can ring there.  Of course the SMS text messages are actually delivered to your cell phone (as defined in your Google Voice setup), but can also be read and responded to online.  There is something to note though in how this works.  Since Google Voice is acting as a go-between in these SMS exchanges, you are sending messages to them, and it is forwarded to your intended recipient.  This means that Google Voice sets up a unique number for that person for this purpose.  When you get a response from them, it comes from this unique number and the SMS response is preceded with their name as you have it in your Google contacts.  Your message to them is from your Google Voice number, and their to you is from a Google Voice number assigned to their number.  If you call it, it forwards to their cell (the one you sent the SMS to) and shows up as having come from your Google Voice number.  As Google explains it, “When you send an SMS through Google Voice, the SMS appears to be sent from your Google number. When someone sends an SMS to your Google number, and it’s forwarded to your mobile phone, it won’t appear as from the sender’s actual number (e.g., the SMS may appear from 1-406-xxx-xxxx). This is so that when you reply to the 1-406-xxx-xxxx number from your phone, the SMS you send appears to be sent from your Google number and will be saved in your Google Voice inbox.“  While this seems a bit confusing, it is seamless and isn’t really the fault of the Voice Central iPhone app.  It’s just the way Google Voice is set up.

There are two things I wish this app did that it doesn’t do.  I wish there was an option to sync your iTunes contacts to your Google Voice contacts, and I wish that you could access those online contacts to configure what group(s) they belong to and how they reach you.  I’m not sure that the Google api allows for that though.  Perhaps one day Google itself will come out with a interface to do that.  Until then, this is the best we have.

This app is $2.99 in the iTunes app store.  If you are usually at a PC, you can probably get by with the web interface to Google Voice.  But if you are mobile a lot an rely on your iPhone, this app is highly recommended.  So go sign up for a Google Voice invite and, if you find yourself hooked on all it has to offer, check out Voice Central.

One of my favorite types of games to play on my iPhone is RPGs.  I especially like the ones that, before even offering a multitude of quests, have enough depth on the front end to provide more than just a token gesture when it comes to setting up your own character.

It was not until I began setting up my character and playing Quest that I immediately recognized the feel to the game and was treated to a wonderful sense of nostalgia.  You see, I spend a great deal of time playing with some of Redshift’s similar games for the Palm platform and loved every minute spent dungeon crawling and quest solving.

While the ratings on iTunes have given them 4.5 stars, there are other product reviewers that have been more negative than that.  Their primary complaint seemed to be the “dated” feel to the interface and graphics. I’d like to comment on that for a moment and put those reviews into perspective.

Games for the iPhone or iPod Touch can divided into two primary types ones that have excellent graphics and those that offer quality game play.  I have both type on my iPhone because one look at the graphics was enough for me to purchase them and excitedly share them with my friends and family as “eye candy” to show off my new phone.

But you know where all those games reside? – On the last of 9 pages of applications.  Why – they are usually long on looks and short on game play.  I tend to get bored with them very easily and set them aside as “eye candy” to pull out when someone else wants to see my phone for the first time.

A good RPG, for me, is more than just a pretty picture.  It provides a decent size selection of races to choose from, each with their own unique attributes and skills.  It then adds to that by allowing you to chose from a vast array of armor and weapons (including magical spells if your character can use them).  You then can embark on an extensive non-linear journey (solving mini-quests and collecting/upgrading weapons, armor, and skills along the way).

That is precisely what is given to all you RPG dungeon rats.  Pretty graphics and a newer game interface would be nice – and Redshift is working on just such an endeavor.  I for one will gladly plunk down  $5.99 and enjoy 50 hours of game play while they work on their next generation RPG.